Coordination, not normative commitment, sustains social order in many regimes.

Evidence

As is true of most who address this issue, Hart seems to have had no grasp of the power of coordination—rather than normative commitments—in sustaining social order even among those who dislike the order (see further Hardin 1985). The Czechoslovak case, while extreme, is not as rare as one might wish. Spanish rule of southern Italy, medieval rule of randomly conquered regions, various Chinese empires, and many colonial governments have had little more than the acquiescence of large parts of the relevant population. Similarly, for many partial rules, such as white rule over African Americans in the United States and the apartheid government of South Africa, acquiescence of many was the most that could be claimed. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 713

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the Blindness reading: Saramago’s collapse happens when coordination capacity (visually mediated) fails, showing coordination’s primacy over commitment in order-sustaining. — connects to: Coordinated evacuation depends on organisation, not on the absence of emotion. — John Drury, The role of social identity processes…, 83; Norms can sustain regimes only while elites can plausibly invoke shared commitments — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 47; Post-capitalism must be globally coordinated, not a return to village scale. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2202
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone working on legitimacy theory or comparative regime stability — the ‘acquiescence not consent’ framing across Spanish Italy, Chinese empires, and US white rule is a striking comparative sweep.